Chapter 7 #5
When she reaches the autoroute, however, she discovers that the lanes still feel unusually narrow.
And it’s only now – because she finds herself correcting her steering over and over again simply in order to remain within those silly white lines – that she realises that it’s not tiredness causing her problems at all.
It’s the alcohol. She’s drunker than she’d let herself realise.
‘Jill, I’m…’ she starts, glancing over at her friend, but seeing that Jill’s head has fallen to one side and that her mouth is wide open, she shrugs and smiles to herself. ‘Looks like you’re on your own here,’ she murmurs.
A signpost comes into view for the next exit and she wonders if it wouldn’t be wiser to get off the motorway.
There does seem to be something particularly criminal about drink-driving along a motorway, but what would they do then?
It’s – she glances at the dashboard – six degrees outside, and raining.
If they tried to sleep in the car they’d wake up frozen, and finding a hotel at – another glance – almost 1 a.m. would prove challenging, if not impossible, and would probably involve more driving than simply going home.
Plus the GPS says the next exit is ‘her’ one anyway.
So no. The road is almost straight and she has four empty lanes to choose from. If she concentrates and keeps her speed down – if she constantly reminds herself that she’s had a few and that her reflexes are going to be slow – they’ll be fine.
She can’t believe that she’s let herself do this. It’s criminal, is what it is. But that’s kind of the problem with alcohol, isn’t it? It makes you unable to do most things properly. And that includes making you unable to realise you can’t do them.
The GPS is telling her to leave at the next exit, and initially she feels relieved about this.
But once she’s negotiated the toll gate, a complicated underpass and two roundabouts, she finds herself feeling even more stressed than before.
Because these small roads with their signposts and traffic lights are infinitely more challenging than the long straight lines of the autoroute.
Anyway, thank goodness for the GPS, eh? Because God knows how people managed in the old days.
Actually, she remembers perfectly how they managed in the old days.
You had the map open on your lap, or folded small and wedged in the middle of the steering wheel, and you just did your best not to run anyone over while you were trying to work out the route.
Coming out of a roundabout, her rear right wheel briefly mounts the pavement, making the car jerk noisily.
‘Whoa!’ Jill says, waking, sitting bolt upright and grappling for the panic handle.
‘Kerb,’ Wendy says. ‘Sorry ’bout that.’
‘God, I though’ you’driben over someone,’ Jill says. She sounds more drunk now than when they left Nice.
‘No,’ Wendy reassures her. ‘Everything’s fine. Just go back to sleep.’
‘I wasn’t sleeping,’ Jill says, sounding offended at the suggestion.
‘Right,’ Wendy says. ‘Fine. Well, go back to whatever you were doing.’
Once Jill has drifted off again, Wendy opens her side window in the hope that the fresh air will make her feel more alert – which it does.
She drives past a police car, blue light flickering, and holds her breath until they’ve vanished from the rearview mirror.
But the French cops were far too busy harassing two Arab lads on mopeds to even think about glancing her way.
Thank God for white privilege, she thinks.
And then suddenly, without her having really noticed, she’s leaving the final proper town on their route and heading up into the hills.
The roads here are dark, wet and winding, but at least there’s no other cars on the road and hopefully zero chance of coming across more police. She takes a deep breath of cold air and forces her shoulders to relax. ‘You’re fine,’ she tells herself. ‘You can do this.’
She thinks how they’ll laugh about this in the morning – imagines telling sleepy Jill how drunk she was – and, for the first time since leaving Nice, she smiles.
‘Whoa!’ Jill says, once again jerking to attention from her slumber. ‘What was that?’
‘Just another stone in the road,’ Wendy tells her.
They’re almost at the Gourdon roundabout now, passing by the car park they did a lap of this morning.
So, in a way, they’re nearly home which is just as well because Wendy has had enough.
She’s feeling far more tired than drunk now – in fact, she thinks she has sobered right up.
But she wants to be home safely in bed. This journey feels like one of those nightmares where every bend is followed by another and another, and then another.
The rain, which stopped a few miles back, has now returned, the droplets slapping strangely against the windscreen.
She focuses, briefly, on the peculiar splatter pattern they’re making rather than on the road beyond the windscreen and almost misses the bend.
Concentrate, Wendy, she tells herself, once she’s jerked the steering wheel to save the day.
After a couple more bends an alert appears on the dashboard with a ‘bong’ sound, but she doesn’t immediately recognise what it means, essentially because she’s too busy staring at the road to give the dashboard her full attention.
It wasn’t a particularly worrying ‘bong’ anyway, more like the noise a lift makes when it reaches the desired floor. Perhaps she needs to buy petrol.
After a couple more bends and rises up the side of the mountain, the raindrops change form again, and it’s exactly at that moment she understands what the warning meant – what the weird orange symbol represents.
‘Shit, Jill, wake up. It’s snowing!’
‘Oh my God!’ Jill exclaims, leaning forward and wiping the windscreen with her arm. ‘Oh I love it! How absolutely beautiful!’
Wendy rolls her eyes at this. Beautiful! she thinks, as if snow were something to be admired rather than something she’s going to have to drive through.
‘… not settling, though,’ Jill comments, sounding disappointed.
‘No, for the moment it’s fine.’
But ‘fine’ doesn’t last for long because as they rise, leaving Gourdon behind them, the road surface turns from black to grey, then to light grey, and then to a scintillating white purity that puts the willies right up them both.
‘It’s going to take forever to get home at this rate,’ Wendy says as she slows to forty, then thirty, then twenty kilometres an hour.
‘Don’t worry,’ Jill says. ‘It’s fine. It’s not like we have a train to catch.’
Which gets Wendy thinking about Jill’s flight from Nice airport in less than forty-eight hours. Because what if it really snows? How will Jill get home then?
Another bend, another rise, and now they’re driving through a bloody snow globe. Despite all the danger and stress of the situation, it’s incredibly beautiful. The pine trees at the side of the road look like images on a Christmas card.
‘It is just so—’ Jill starts to say, but suddenly Wendy is slamming on the brakes and the car is shuddering, sliding briefly out of control before, thankfully, slithering to a halt.
‘Look!’ Wendy says, once they’ve stopped. She points out of her passenger window to where the deer she almost hit has paused, sniffing the cold night air.
‘Oh!’ Jill says, her voice almost tearful with awe. ‘God, I’ve never seen a Bambi before. And in the snow!’
‘She’s not going anywhere,’ Wendy says. ‘I think she wants to say hello.’
The deer sniffs the air again, snorts, and then turns and bolts off into the trees.
‘Abso-bloody-lutely amazing,’ Jill says.
‘That was,’ Wendy agrees. ‘Scared the shit out of me, though. She ran right in front of the car. One second earlier and she’d have been dead meat. One second earlier and we’d all have been meat.’
After a couple of nerve-wracking failures, Wendy manages to re-start the engine. And now they’re off again, moving even more slowly than before.
‘That’s, like, proper inches of snow, isn’t it?’ Jill says as they round a bend into ever more perfect whiteness. ‘We are going to make it, aren’t we?’
That is, after all, the real question, isn’t it?
Wendy has been trying to picture the road ahead, trying to recall the various twists and turns.
Because if there’s one more proper hill they need to climb then they might not make it.
She’s never really driven in snow before.
You don’t get a lot of it in Kent and when you do you tend to leave the car at home.
She’s having trouble predicting how the car will react.
The steering wheel is getting less and less precise the thicker the snowfall becomes. The car is starting to feel more like a boat, where you steer and then wait a bit for something to happen.
‘Should we turn back?’ Jill asks, unnerved by the fact that Wendy hasn’t answered.
But Wendy has been picturing that option, too. She’s been imagining driving back down those hills and trying to brake for all the hairpin bends, in snow, in order to avoid sliding over the edge and dying. ‘No, I think that might be worse,’ she says, glancing at Jill. ‘We’re nearly home anyway.’
When she looks back at the road, though, she sees a bend she has failed to anticipate.
It’s not a crazy bend by any means, and the downhill slope they’re on is only a gentle one, and they’re travelling at less than twenty kilometres an hour, but all the same, when she tries to brake nothing happens, and when she tries to steer that doesn’t seem to work either, so they continue to slither gently, undramatically forward, as if in slow motion, in an almost perfect straight line on a road where they really do need to be curving to the left.
She turns the steering wheel one way and then the other until she can’t even tell which way the wheels are pointing anymore. She tries braking, accelerating, anything, but nothing makes the slightest bit of difference. They slide inexorably onwards.